[HN Gopher] Vela incident (1979)
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Vela incident (1979)
Author : rwmj
Score : 73 points
Date : 2023-11-13 11:22 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| "Only one country (South Africa) has been known to ever dismantle
| an indigenously developed nuclear arsenal completely."
|
| 3 other countries have given up their Soviet nuclear weapons:
| Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| Definitely led to peace in Ukraine!
|
| "The memoranda, signed in Patria Hall at the Budapest
| Convention Center with US Ambassador Donald M. Blinken amongst
| others in attendance,[3] prohibited the Russian Federation, the
| United Kingdom and the United States from threatening or using
| military force or economic coercion against Ukraine, Belarus,
| and Kazakhstan, "except in self-defence or otherwise in
| accordance with the Charter of the United Nations." As a result
| of other agreements and the memorandum, between 1993 and 1996,
| Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine gave up their nuclear
| weapons.[4][5]"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum
| ajross wrote:
| To be fair: the geopolitical goal wasn't "peace" in the
| abstract, it was to prevent nuclear weapons from being abused
| or lost by a failed state. Russia wasn't "trusted" per se,
| but they were felt to be a safer stability bet on the whole
| than a tiny breakaway state with minimal history of self-
| rule.
|
| In hindsight, that was wrong of course. But the logic seemed
| clear and everyone agreed at the time.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I think the key in the original sentence is: "indigenously
| developed".
|
| Though given the talent for engineering we're currently seeing
| from Ukraine, I'm not sure that Russias nuclear weapons where
| not developed by Ukrainians.
|
| Anyway, the point is that those three countries gave up weapons
| develop and produced by the Soviet Union, not internally in
| those countries solely.
| flkiwi wrote:
| They also never had sole custody and control over the weapons
| themselves or the tools to enable them. The weapons were _in_
| , say, Ukraine, but they were never _Ukraine 's_.
| runeofdoom wrote:
| Much like the US had weapons in Turkey (for many years, IDK
| if they still are), but those weapons were under US
| control. (Although if the combination on the safeties is
| still all 0s, that may be less than completely accurate.)
| jjk166 wrote:
| The difference is that all those now-independent
| countries were parts of the Soviet Union when the weapons
| were placed there. So it's more like the US stationing
| weapons in North Dakota, and then North Dakota breaking
| away.
| sillywalk wrote:
| The nukes are still in Turkey at Incirlik Air Base.
| Estimates are between 20-50.
|
| Other NATO countries that still have U.S. nukes under
| custody: Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium.
|
| Canada had nukes under a similar arrangement until 1984.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_sharing
| martopix wrote:
| Also "dismantled". Presumably those countries gave their
| arsenals to Russia.
| tokai wrote:
| Belarus got some of them back this summer.
| thefounder wrote:
| Did they? I thought there are just russian troops(with
| nukes)stationed there.
| golergka wrote:
| > 3 other countries have given up their Soviet nuclear weapons:
| Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine
|
| That's not entirely true. AFAIK, nuclear weapons in these
| countries were tied to control structures in Moscow and
| required other resources like maintenance and new materials
| which were placed in other parts of Soviet Union. So when these
| countries became independent, they couldn't realistically
| maintain or even use the weapons without a very significant
| investment.
| foobarian wrote:
| Key sensor involved in detection:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhangmeter. Gotta love engineering
| humor.
| radicality wrote:
| Interesting! Another example where ChatGPT hallucinates stuff.
| I first checked Wikipedia and saw this correct history:
|
| > The name is derived from the Hindi word "bhang", a locally
| grown variety of cannabis which is smoked or drunk to induce
| intoxicating effects, the joke being that one would have to be
| on drugs to believe the bhangmeter detectors would work
| properly.
|
| ChatGPT on the other hand claimed something completely
| different and unrelated to the origin.
|
| > The term "bhangmeter" is the more technically correct and
| widely used name, stemming from a whimsical contraction of
| "bang" (referring to the explosion) and "V. F. H. Metzger", who
| contributed to its development.
| PokemonNoGo wrote:
| Further down the rabbit hole. "Bang" is slang in Swedish of
| being high on cannabis. I had to look up where it came from
| and:
|
| >From Tavringer Romani beng, bang ("devil, satan"), from
| Romani beng ("devil"). Related to Sanskrit vyngg (vyanga,
| "speckled, deformed").
|
| Bangometer totally conveys the same thing in Swedish and most
| would understand the meaning.
| golergka wrote:
| > ChatGPT hallucinates stuff
|
| What model did you use?
| radicality wrote:
| Whatever is the current ChatGPT Pro subscription default
| model for ChatGPT-4.
|
| https://chat.openai.com/share/8e9caf23-158b-498a-9261-7f257
| f...
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| I wonder if ChatGPT will perform worse when you address it
| like you did here, with sentence fragments akin to a google
| search, instead of asking it things in a conversation.
|
| I asked "how did the bhangmeter sensor get its name?" and got
| a complete and accurate response.
|
| https://chat.openai.com/share/66788bbc-5c2e-4e0d-9a5d-370b2c.
| ..
| gosub100 wrote:
| Are there any youtube videos that go into the theory of
| proliferation and how an arms race works, or is there just not
| that much information available? I've kind of tired myself of the
| technical details of how the weapons work, the modes of delivery,
| and the (feeble) countermeasures. But the theory about _why_ we
| have to keep developing them (arms race) is really fascinating
| (in a macabre way). It 's so easy to have a child's view that WMD
| are terrible (and yes, they are) and therefore should be
| eliminated. But the fact that they are so terrible is
| paradoxically _why_ we have to keep advancing them. I want to
| learn more about that.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| This might be interesting for you:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_latency
|
| > Nuclear latency or a nuclear threshold state is the condition
| of a country possessing the technology to quickly build nuclear
| weapons, without having actually yet done so.
|
| > There are many countries capable of producing nuclear
| weapons, or at least enriching uranium or manufacturing
| plutonium. Among the most notable are Japan, Canada, Germany,
| the Netherlands, and Australia.
|
| > Taiwan and South Korea have both been identified as
| "insecure" nuclear threshold states--states with the technical
| capability to develop nuclear weapons and the security
| motivations to seriously contemplate such an option.
| gosub100 wrote:
| That is interesting. Makes me think about the stories in the
| past few years that U235 can theoretically be condensed from
| seawater. Not good for proliferation.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Not good for proliferation.
|
| What do you think it changes about proliferation?
| gosub100 wrote:
| If it's proved viable wouldn't it allow anyone with
| access to the sea to obtain uranium? (I know you need
| concentrated U-235 to make an explosion, but just getting
| to yellowcake is enough to attract attention, right?).
| krisoft wrote:
| It would still require a lot of power and a lot of
| infrastructure to do it. If a country or organisation
| would try to go down that route others would see that
| they spend a lot of effort on slurping seawater through
| machines they can't explain with anything else.
|
| That is the bottleneck how nuclear non-proliferation is
| enforced. You can hide your intentions, but you can't
| hide that a lot or energy is flowing into a process you
| don't have a good explanation for. Because of this
| detecting a sea water sourced extraction would be even
| easier than a nuclear program based on mined uranium.
| (Because you need to enrich from an even weaker starting
| condition.)
|
| What happens after detection is either diplomacy (they
| ask the country to stop nicely, reminding them of the
| consequences) or force (bombing the facilities).
| jjk166 wrote:
| Uranium can be extracted from sea water but it's still a
| natural mixture of U238 and U235. It still needs to be
| enriched to produce weapons material.
| treypitt wrote:
| Here is a good realist take on Iranian proliferation
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hjfBGI7qXg
| cdot2 wrote:
| Not youtube videos but I would recommend Henry Kissinger's book
| Diplomacy which talks about this to some extent (although that
| is not the primary focus of the book).
| krisoft wrote:
| If you are interested in the topic I recommend the Arms Control
| Wonk podcast for on-going non-proliferation news. Or if you are
| interested in more historical stuff The Reason We're All Still
| Here or The Deal podcast from the same folks.
| jjk166 wrote:
| One thing I've been thinking about recently is how lucky
| humanity was to have developed nuclear weapons precisely when
| we did. One could imagine a multitude of technologies that
| potentially pose an existential threat - rogue AI, grey goo,
| genetically engineered super-viruses, etc. Even mundane
| technologies like prolonged fossil fuel consumption or CFCs can
| have disastrous consequences if a society does not realize it
| is capable of causing its own extinction and thus never stops.
| While it's possible to anticipate some of the dangers, the
| roads that lead to these technological endpoints are paved in
| good intentions - there are so many good reasons to advance
| computers or genetics, etc. Preventing proliferation of these
| threats might not even be possible once the technologies
| advance far enough. Further, all these existentially
| threatening technologies become possible once a civilization
| learns the same few principles - if you have the knowledge of
| physics and chemistry to develop one, you're within a few
| decades at most of developing any of the others.
|
| How fortunate then are we that the first really existentially
| threatening technology we developed was the atomic bomb? It's a
| technology that is so obviously destructive, and so distantly
| related from any useful application, so alien in its method of
| function, that it's perhaps the only technology in history to
| be near universally seen as too dangerous to use at scale. It
| requires both secret knowledge and immense industrial capacity
| to make even a single device, nonetheless enough devices and
| delivery systems to actually pose that existential threat, and
| thus we only need a small handful of large nation states to
| agree not to use them. It's arguably the very easiest
| existential threat to handle. Since developing them, we have
| become cognizant of our civilization's threat to itself, and
| now every advancement we make is met with the question "does
| this pose any existential risk?" which our forebears never
| asked, and which we ourselves might not have asked otherwise.
|
| But it's not just that we developed nukes first. The timing
| down to the month was critical. Our first nuclear weapons were
| dropped in the last days of the worst war our planet had ever
| known. We only had a few, and the decision to drop them was
| made by people who did not witness nor fully comprehend their
| destructive potential. As it happened, in the peace that came
| about after the end of the second world war, there was an
| opportunity to observe the devastation the bombs had wrought,
| for the hatred that had led to their use to subside, and for
| the nuclear monopoly to be broken before another major war
| could start. But imagine if the bomb was developed a bit
| earlier, say midway through WW2, we might have dropped dozens
| or even hundreds of bombs, completely normalizing their use and
| irradiating large sections of continents before anyone really
| second guessed it. Conversely, if the weapons were developed in
| peacetime, either before or after the war, then the threat
| might go completely unrecognized and no one would think twice
| about opening the next war with an all out nuclear attack, or
| perhaps without the wartime funding we would just never have
| developed them at all and never recognize our species' ability
| to destroy itself. It's very well possible that if we had
| discovered the neutron a few years earlier, or if the US had
| not committed so many resources to the Manhattan project, or if
| Japan had surrendered a little earlier, we might now be
| extinct.
| pvg wrote:
| https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Bomb/Fred-Kaplan/...
|
| Is a fun read. Get the audiobook version and think of it as a
| long youtube video playlist that you play in the background.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Are there any youtube videos that go into the theory of
| proliferation and how an arms race works, or is there just not
| that much information available?_
|
| I don't have a youtube video for you, but I do have a book
| recommendation: Thomas Schelling's "The Strategy of Conflict"
| from 1960.
|
| The writing is extremely clear and accessible, by the standards
| of nobel-prize-winning economists.
| kortex wrote:
| This is also the work that introduced the idea of the game
| theoretical focal point, aka Schelling point
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)
| gosub100 wrote:
| Thank you, I will check out the book. Yes I forgot that it is
| essentially economics at the core of it. All of the same
| economic arguments also apply to biological weapons too.
| Here's to hoping neither is ever used.
| speed_spread wrote:
| A.K.A. "Tell me you have the bomb without telling me you have the
| bomb."
|
| Technically, they probably didn't have to test it to know it
| worked. But for a nuclear weapon to be an effective deterrent you
| have to demonstrate it somehow. But you still need plausible
| deniability to abide by the world standards of peace-loving
| democracies /s
| mrweasel wrote:
| They also had a test site in the Kalahari desert. The plan was
| to detonate a nuclear weapon within the territory of South
| Africa in case they where threatened by communist Angola, to
| show that they had and was serious about using nuclear weapons.
| The idea was that this would force Western powers to intervene
| on the side of South Africa, to avoid nuclear weapons being
| used against Angola.
|
| There is a great book detailing the nuclear program in South
| Africa: https://www.amazon.com/South-Africas-Weapons-Mass-
| Destructio...
| golergka wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_of_deliberate_ambiguity
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